But by this point, several people – notably Ted Frank of the Competitive Enterprise Institute – saw a perfect test case for dealing with growing abuses of the cy pres system that have been increasingly appearing in front of appeals courts across the nations, with varying degrees of agreement.

Frank basic argument is that that there is a clear conflict of interest in attorneys listing their alma maters as recipients. The money should be given to charities rather than extremely wealthy universities, he argued. And even then only after every effort had been made to give the money to those actually impacted.

By his estimate, given real world figures of claim percentage, the payments would amount to between $5 and $10 per claimant, rather than the 67 cents that the lawyers claimed. It was Frank that argued his case to the Supreme Court [PDF] on Wednesday morning.